Quite the interesting scenario

I’m quite the idiot at times, I completely understand this. But I find needlessly spending money quite horrific, and this is where my adventure started.

Since getting my son out of the hospital, the medical bills have been pouring in, and with a lot of sacrifice and a little help from Uncle Sam’s tax returns, we have slowly been getting a handle on our expenses. A month-long stay in the intensive care unit can put a damper on the wallet.

I mention this because this is what was going through my head the other night while I was in the fetal position on the bathroom floor trying to get my abdominal pains to go away. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shortly after dinner, I started getting some stomach cramps. I have possibly the worst plumbing in the world, so abdominal cramps aren’t necessarily anything new to me. I dismissed it as normal wear and tear and proceeded to go through my nightly ritual of eating anything in sight and complaining about the single chore I am assigned each day. As the night progressed, the cramps began to get a little worse, and by 10pm I was in what I consider pretty decent pain.

Now I’m not that big of a wimp, despite my outward appearances. I won’t go into the boring details of what kind of pain I can and can’t handle, because that’s another story (specifically related to my first date with the wife … but that doesn’t sound too good does it). Anyway, I would say I have a decent tolerance for pain, and it’s this belief that further led to my demise.

By 11pm I had to excuse myself from our bed in order to go downstairs and ache alone. I was afraid I would wake the wife, so I thought it best to lie in a bed where I wouldn’t bother her. So I laid down thinking that I just had to work through these stupid cramps, shut up, and get a few hours of sleep before the call of the work whistle beckoned me. The wife came down shortly afterwards to advise me to go to the hospital and to see if she could help. I’m a MAN, I don’t need no help, I can do anything … do you have any gas medicine? I think she gave me the same stuff that she gives the count when he’s a little gassy lassie. Should do the job just fine, I’ll be back upstairs in a few minutes sweetie.

By the time she came back to check on me at 2am I was lying naked on the floor by the toilet, trying to decide which end would be more useful in the vicinity. To say the least, not a pretty sight. Imagine Chris Farley on a three day bender after the SNL Patrick Swayze dance scene and you might get the idea.

When the wife mentions again that I probably should go to the hospital, all that goes through my head is “I’m not going to pay $2000.00 to fart in the emergency room” which is exactly what I thought would happen. The wife just smiles and says, “I think you need to go to the hospital”, but what does she know. (Some of you might get that).

After rolling around on the tile floor of my bathroom for two hours, it crossed my mind that this might not be gas, but something more serious, but since it centered around my stomach, I didn’t think it was kidney stones. After trying to drown myself to get rid of the pain, I think my body started to imagine pain in places that it wasn’t, because the aches just kept migrating around.

By 3am I had a different outlook on life. I had decided that if I could just vomit, that the action would push the kidney stone (which by now I was convinced it had to be) through my system and I could get a little relief. Luckily for me, the action was not far behind the thought. Unluckily for me, the action gave little relief and just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was about this time that I had an original thought and I told the wife “I think I may need to go to the hospital”. And after giving me the look normally reserved for small children and stupid husbands, we loaded up the family and headed to the emergency room.

I’ll skip the usual pleasantries of emergency room characters in the middle of the night, and fast forward to the part where the doctor comes in and says “You don’t have kidney stones.”

That’s it, this is the $2000.00 fart that I was about to experience. I knew I was right, I knew I should have stayed home, I’m going to be broke for the rest of my life, now I probably have the swine flu to top it all off!

So he says they’re probably going to need to remove my gall bladder. Oh shut up. Sure she was right … I’m still going to be broke.